At my old school last fall, before the spring of Ma’s arrest that brought me and Eli to the bayou in summer, my principal introduced me to an old man in a tweed suit who had asked to speak with me. I had only seen suits at funerals before—usually black or gray, sometimes with gang colors—but this one looked like it came straight out of the English countryside. I asked him whether it was a Norfolk shooting jacket, and the man said, “That’s partly why I’m here.” Not to talk about Norfolk shooting jackets, he said, but wasn’t that a strange thing for a twelve-year-old in this neighborhood to reference? My principal looked kind of embarrassed, but what did I care, we both knew the school was no good. Hardly any textbooks from the past decade, almost every website blocked on the Internet, and as for its students, I had found not one true friend among them. I wasn’t always very amiable, it’s true, but I don’t think anyone would be, what with everything learned coming from library books lugged home to distract little brothers from everything else. From the days when we sat with our backs to the bedroom door to brace it shut. From the smashed dishes, from the men. And from the drugs. In A Fairy Tale Companion, my latest library find, magic white powder usually came from evil godmothers proffering curses disguised as gifts, which is also how it seemed to fall into our mother’s hands each week.
I used the library’s computer carrels to learn other things, too. About the death of coral reefs in the Pacific, the number of northern white rhinos left in the wild—three—and all the capital cities of Africa, since no one seemed to be able to name them like the European ones. The capital of Namibia is called Windhoek, which I hadn’t expected at all.
The old man in the jacket told me his job was to find local students like me, students who might be able to make it somewhere else, in a great big boarding school with a special slot saved for someone of my background and aptitude. I wouldn’t have to live with my mother anymore, he said, which I’ll admit perked me up a little bit. He would, of course, involve her in the conversation, he said, and seek her consent. Parents always consented to these opportunities.
“Jada,” he said, “what do you say?”
But there was only one available slot. If I went with him to the new school, Eli wouldn’t be able to come with me. Eli, who was only eight years old.
So, I said, thanks but no thanks.
Ma was caught during a raid in our own dang apartment building, where the police found two hundred dollars’ worth of coke she had failed to deal. Our friendliest neighbor, Miss Hedda Bell, took us in during the social worker visits and the court dates, and by the end of May, Ma had stepped into Claxton prison for the first day of the next five years. Miss Hedda Bell began making some calls.
I had forgotten to return A Fairy Tale Companion by the day I sat with Eli outside our apartment complex, waiting for our grandparents to arrive from three states over. We had seen them before, maybe once a year when they drove over at Christmastime, but they always left in a sad mood and it seemed like it hurt them to be here for more than a day.
In any case, no one was concerned about a library fee at that exact moment, not even our social worker, who I suspected was new to the job and who smelled like the kiwi hand sanitizer she was always squelching between her fingers. She paced the little strip of grass between the freeway and the curb, her face mostly hidden by the massive cell phone she held to one ear, then another. Something about visitation rights, but also second-degree manslaughter. The dirty windows of our old apartment stared over our heads. The book, I told Eli, was as good as ours.
My brother leaned against my shoulder and watched me flip through stories, the tight curls of our hair tangling in the wind. Inside the peripheries of the covers propped on my knees, we gazed into the shadows of a graphite forest etched in printed illustrations, densely cross-hatched where the thorns of roses coiled around jagged stumps, and where flaking birches clawed upward from their roots. The artist of that page had spared three details for sunlight: a boy and a girl in clogs and bonnets, a trail of shell-white larks pecking at the ground behind them, and the house they walked toward, a lattice-trimmed cabin of gingerbread.